Scorpion Strike

by Nance, John J. ;

  “Pretty brave of the man, don’t you think?”

  “After inventing it? No, I don’t think he’s brave. I think he’s a little rat trying to save his skin. But we need him.”

  “How …” Doug cleared his throat as well and began again. “How do we … I mean, why are we flying a two-ship to Europe?”

  “We’re not. Cairo Control is not supposed to know it’s a two-ship. To them, it’s just MAC Alpha 284. We’re tucked in below with our transponder off and our lights off. We go like that to El Dab’a.”

  “They’ll see us on radar. They’ll see the skin paint.”

  “No, they won’t. This was my idea, Doug, and it’s basically the same thing the Israelis did to bomb the Iraqi nuclear facilities several years back. I tried it a few years ago one day over Canada with a sister ship. We were bored, the controller was bored, and I got to wondering, if two big airplanes like this were flying close together and only one had his transponder on, what would radar see?”

  “Only one?”

  “Right. Our air defense radars and those the Soviets use can do better, but with the radars the Egyptians and everyone else but the Israelis are using, they can’t see us when we’re tucked up there in a modified close trail.”

  “Geez. I never thought of that. What happens at El Dab’a? We dive and run on the water?”

  “Come on, Doug. We’d never get a 141 in under radar. No, this is where it gets interesting—and challenging. There’s a DC-10 headed to Baghdad from Switzerland. The Red Cross chartered it with our help. He doesn’t know it, but he’s going to carry us over Beirut, over Syria, and into Iraq. We break off and land several hundred miles out of Baghdad under the wildest burst of radar interference the Coalition has mounted since the war started.”

  Doug straightened up and looked at Will admiringly. “You thought all this up?”

  “Part of it.”

  “In two days?”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “I’ll take back my statements. You’re good enough to be a reservist. In fact, you think like an airline crew scheduler.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “Depends on your point of view. One question.”

  “What?”

  “I … no regrets I came along, okay? But what happens if, uh, they spot us going in?”

  “Gross navigational error and we’re real sorry.”

  “How about if they force us to land in, say, Syria or Jordan, or goddamn Beirut?”

  “We don’t do that.”

  They stared at each other for a second in silence. The 141 had no defensive systems. Defying a fighter who wanted you to land was suicide.

  “And if we get jumped in Iraq?”

  “That’s different. We’re in touch with the AWACS every second once we get across the Syrian border. We have fighter CAP nearby and rescue choppers with blades turning just over the Saudi border, and even on the ground we’ll have the combat support team to guard us.”

  “We landing at an airport?”

  “No.”

  “The desert?”

  “No. A road. It’s wide enough, and a combat support team was dropped in twenty-four hours ago to secure it and mark it with lights—of a sort.”

  “What do you mean, ‘of a sort’?”

  “There’s …” Will began, “… there’s one other thing.”

  “What? These surprises are killing me.”

  “You ever used night-vision goggles?”

  Doug pulled back and looked incredulous, a tell-me-you’re-joking sort of smile creeping across his face. “No-o-o!”

  “Well, I’ve had a little instruction, but …”

  “This is where you tell me we’ve got to land on a rural road in the middle of Iraq in the middle of the night wearing night-vision goggles, right?”

  “Afraid so. That was the part I couldn’t quite work out of the plan. The team down there will be marking the runway with fluorescent light sticks that only show up on the goggles.”

  Doug was nodding slowly, a thoroughly serious expression on his face.

  “You’ve succeeded, Will.”

  “In doing what?”

  “In scaring the hell out of me, too.”

  4

  MAC Alpha 284, in flight over central Saudi Arabia

  Wednesday, March 6, 1991—9:40 P.M. (1840 GMT)

  Technical Sergeant Phil Casey, the loadmaster, leaned awkwardly against the folded crew entrance ladder and surveyed his airborne cargo compartment while sipping a cup of rancid, re-warmed coffee. The seventeen-ton M-3 Bradley fighting vehicle and the two M-113 armored personnel carriers—tracked, tanklike vehicles, the Bradley festooned with guns—barely fit in the interior of the Starlifter. The members of the strike force were sandwiched on each side of the huge machines in what he considered the least comfortable seats in aviation, the ubiquitous red canvas folding sidewall seats, now occupied by eighteen Army commandos, most of whom were sleeping in the universal GI position: any way they could. Casey thought about offering coffee to their commanding officer, Major Moyer, a ramrod-straight infantryman with a perpetually grim expression and a crewcut, but rejected the idea. I don’t really dislike the man that much, he chuckled to himself. The coffee was terrible, even by MAC standards.

  The aircraft commander, Colonel Westerman, had promised to give him and Sandra a thorough briefing sometime in the next hour, and he was looking forward to that. Whatever they were getting ready to do, the Delta Force major had already told him he wanted the rear cargo doors open and the ramp down before the plane rolled to a stop. Where they were going to roll to a stop was still a mystery. The two pilots had gone off headset to discuss it. Iraq, he figured. Some airport up there in the dead of night, perhaps. The thought of bullets crashing into his airplane gave him a momentary chill, but that sort of thing didn’t happen to MAC reserve crews in C-141s. Or so he hoped. Besides, the war was over and the Coalition had won.

  The Iraqi sat only a few feet from the cockpit ladder on one of the sidewall seats, apparently consumed with his own thoughts. Phil had never met an Iraqi before. The man seemed gentle and well-spoken, thanking him for a cup of water in perfect English with a British accent. Interesting. As a struggling artist, he had found himself studying the man’s face carefully, trying to memorize its subtleties. Perhaps he could sketch it, pen and ink, before he forgot. The features were angular, with prominent cheekbones and slightly sunken dark brown eyes, a slight underbite, and a powerful brow. The man had jet black hair combed loosely forward and close-cropped on the side. The eyebrows were what made him memorable, though. Dark, bushy, wild eyebrows, as if he’d never trimmed them. He had no mustache, and Phil wondered if he’d look more Arab if he had one. His skin was not as olive in complexion as most Saudis he’d seen, but perhaps the fellow didn’t spend as much time in the sun.

  Phil closed his eyes and checked his memory of the face again. He specialized in portraiture, his part-time flying in the Air Force reserves keeping him from being a starving artist in the truest sense. With the public’s interest in things Arab following the war, it might prove valuable if he could do a classic portrait of this fellow.

  “How you doing, Load?”

  Casey jumped as Colonel Harris touched his shoulder. He’d been concentrating too hard. Harris had somehow come down the ladder undetected.

  “Just fine, sir. Can I get you anything?”

  The words had to be half-yelled over the tremendous noise of the air-conditioning ducts. Harris bent down next to his headset. “No. Just coming back to talk to our guest.” He moved on past Casey, navigating carefully past the stack of crew bags to where the Iraqi was sitting and staring at the floor.

  “Dr. Abbas?”

  Shakir Abbas looked up to find Doug Harris leaning over him, trying to talk above the amazing din of the airplane.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s too damn noisy down here. Why don’t you come up to the flight deck so we can talk for a few minutes?”

 
; Abbas nodded and followed Harris up the four-foot ladder through the offset entryway to the large cockpit compartment and paused at the top, noting the single sidewall seat tucked to the left of the doorway, the navigator’s station directly forward of the entrance, and the three seats to the right along the aft bulkhead of the cockpit.

  “This is very large,” he said, his words lost in the background noise. Doug motioned him to one of the seats along the aft wall, behind the flight engineer’s side-facing seat and panel, and sat beside him. The white noise of the slipstream was still ferocious, but conversation was not impossible.

  “Doctor, this has been one of the wilder evenings of my life. I just got involved with this mission at the last minute, so there are some things I’d like to ask you.”

  “I heard Colonel Westerman say that there had been a change of crew.”

  Doug nodded, smiling. “I didn’t have any idea Will was even in Saudi Arabia until two hours ago. I walk through a door, and here’s my old friend!”

  “You have known each other a long time, then?”

  Doug laughed. “Just about forever. You ever have a friend you grew up with, went to school with, chased girls with, worked with, and—in my case—even joined the Air Force with?”

  “No, not exactly.” Memories of his childhood flickered by, a childhood of few friends and many taunts—especially the two years after his father disappeared, when they had been forced to hide with cousins in the desert. Those had been the worst years of his life.

  “Well, that was the case with Will and me. Although we’ve kind of lost touch over the years.” Doug glanced forward for a second, remembering Will’s sudden departure from McChord—what was it, seventeen years ago? The day after Doug’s wedding, he had vanished.

  Doug focused again on Shakir. “I’m sorry to get sidetracked.”

  Shakir had been gazing forward as well. He turned then and met Doug’s gaze. “I heard one of your men say you were an airline pilot, but how are you also in the Air Force?”

  Doug laughed at that. “Sometimes I wonder that myself! No, I was on active duty for five years before I joined what we call an associate reserve unit. That means I fly the same airplanes on the same missions that I did on active duty, but I tell them when I want to come out and fly. Unless a war breaks out and my whole unit gets called to active service, which is what happened last fall when your sumbitch president decided to invade Kuwait.”

  Shakir nodded, his eyes locked on Doug.

  “So,” Doug continued, “Will up there has always been on active duty. He was never with the airlines, but I’ve been flying airliners in the U.S. for fifteen years, and flying these 141s in between commercial flights. In fact, I had just been promoted to full colonel and was just getting ready to retire when all this broke out, and suddenly I’m commanding an active-duty heavy airlift squadron and shuttling to your part of the world. It’s been a bit of a shock.”

  “Iraq has reserve military people, too, but they are used differently, I think.”

  “I’ll be frank with you, Doctor. I don’t think much of your country’s military or its so-called leader, okay?”

  “I understand, Colonel. I apologize for mentioning it,” Shakir replied.

  “That’s all right. What I came back to ask you about, this … this … bug, for want of a better name, that you developed, is it that deadly?”

  Abbas studied Doug’s face and nodded solemnly. “More so than we ever thought possible, Colonel.”

  Doug began to speak, but Abbas raised his finger. “Please … let me tell you something … about how this happened. Would you permit me to do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thank you. Colonel Westerman has been … too busy to hear me on this.” He studied the floor for a few seconds and glanced forward with a concerned look before turning back toward Doug. “You do not need both pilots in the front seats to fly?”

  “No. Don’t worry. We’ve got nearly forty-five minutes to go before we join up with the tanker to air-refuel, and in the meantime, as long as we’ve got the autopilot on, one pilot up there is sufficient. You were going to tell me something.”

  Abbas nodded, shifting position slightly, folding his left leg on the seat to face Doug more squarely.

  “You have no reason to believe me, but I never for a moment thought that any of the things I was working on would ever be used. They are all too terrible. Weapons that can kill your own army and citizens are exceedingly poor weapons. You have people in your country—the Soviets do in theirs—who spend their lives developing bigger and more terrible bombs. These scientists can live with this because they do not really believe such weapons will ever be used, because to do so would be insane. They build bombs like I built what you called ‘bugs,’ to scare the adversary into not attacking, or, in Saddam’s case, to scare others into letting him have his way, whether with Kuwait or somebody else.”

  “But you created something terrible, didn’t you?”

  Shakir nodded again. “More awful than something that just explodes. This could contaminate—ruin—entire regions. If it gets into a water table, it could contaminate it perhaps for decades, killing all mammals, including man, who come in contact with it.”

  He studied Doug’s face for a few seconds before continuing. “It was a complete accident. I was doing a series of genetic-engineering manipulations of a certain promising viral strain that was mildly infectious, bombarding it with ultraviolet radiation to cause mutations. We would always test the various mutations with mixed results, but when we exposed a rack of lab animals to this, they were all dead within two hours. The more we tested, the more incredibly lethal it turned out to be, and the more resilient! I found it could live in water. Not just an isotonic solution, but any water! And, partly because it is encapsulated in a common bacteria, it can survive heating to nearly boiling, it can be dried or frozen, go dormant for an indefinite period, and still regenerate and kill. More important, it is horribly infectious and kills very rapidly. The more I tested, the more excited I got, because, after all, I was trying to build a biological equivalent to your triad defense. I was trying to build a biochemical neutron bomb. And I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.” Shakir took a deep breath, the effort of talking over the background noise greater than he’d expected.

  The flight engineer pulled his headset aside and leaned toward Doug. “Sir? Colonel W. wants to know when you’re coming back up front.”

  Doug looked distracted. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing, sir, except he needs to visit the head, and he’d rather leave someone flying the airplane while he’s gone. His words, not mine.”

  Doug laughed at that and motioned him away. “Tell him he’ll just have to hold it till the next rest stop.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You were saying, Doctor?”

  “It was all pure research, you see. Not the real world. That’s what I stupidly thought.”

  “So did Dr. Nobel when he developed dynamite.”

  Shakir nodded. “I tell Saddam’s people in Baghdad—this thing can never be used. Threaten, yes, but never plan to use it. He has ordered us, you see, as of 1989, to go live at the laboratory until we give him the weapons he wants. Remember the Israeli raid on our nuclear facility? It made Saddam determined to build a terrible weapon the Israelis couldn’t reach. Nuclear bombs require triggers and other telltale supplies. A biological bomb requires only a few dozen scientists working sixteen hours a day in a hole somewhere—people who were put through school by the state—people who have a comfortable life and families who are safe to live and grow only as long as they obey and keep researching. People like me.”

  Doug turned to the flight engineer again. “I guess he’s suffered long enough. Tell the pilot I’ll be up in two minutes.”

  “Roger.” The engineer punched his interphone button as Shakir continued. “As soon as the BBC announced that the ground war was over and our army was destroyed, those of us in my facility rejoiced and got read
y to burn the virus and the lab. Then the message comes. We are to package the virus in containers for shipment to the front. What front? I ask. I am told to shut up.”

  “You don’t know where he’s planning on …”

  Shakir shrugged, hands out. “Perhaps the Kurds. He hates the Kurds as Hitler hated the Jews, maybe more. He hates the Jews, too, especially Israelis, but how can he reach them with this weapon? More than that, I think he plans to send it south.”

  “To Saudi?”

  “And Kuwait, and perhaps even the United States and England if he can. Once we have lost control of this, who knows?”

  “How powerful is it?”

  “It is difficult in biological terms to speak of a virus as being powerful, but are you aware how deadly the botulism bacteria is to human life?”

  “I’ve heard. A teaspoon could kill a thousand humans?”

  “Yes, approximately. But this is potentially much worse, because it continues to multiply rapidly when it attacks a living host.”

  “Can a cure be found?”

  “Not in time. Not in time to prevent thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of deaths. Will quarantine work? Perhaps, but it is not like the HIV virus. It is very aggressive, very infectious, and because of the incredible speed with which it causes our own cells to produce lethal toxins, it’s worse than the ancient black plague. There are no human antibodies in any population built up to oppose this, and it doesn’t give the human immune system time to manufacture any. All of mankind stands completely vulnerable to a virus like this.”

  Shakir Abbas leaned forward, his eyes boring into Doug’s.

  “Colonel, Saddam has tricked your President again. He has succeeded in getting everyone worried about nuclear weaponry and bomb-grade plutonium—chasing and bombing those facilities—while the real doomsday weapon is buried in the desert, in my lab.”

  “Yours was the only biological lab?”

  Shakir shook his head vigorously. “Oh no! There are many more. Whether anyone else has had a breakthrough, I can’t say, but my lab was only one of many.”

  Doug breathed heavily and sat back a bit. “The opportunity for terrorism with this stuff is mind-boggling.”